1. Field of the Invention
The subject invention relates to a method for recording a clean broadcast free of background, such as advertisements, fade-ins, and fade-outs on a receiver while the user listens to the normal broadcast.
2. Discussion
Broadcasters commonly provide content to users for entertainment. This content may have interspaced advertisements, fade-ins, fade-outs or other background items placed within the content. The broadcast content may also include noise or other interferences. Users listening to the radio or watching television may particularly like a broadcast that they would like to download, replay or possibly purchase for later use. While broadcasters commonly provide station call letters, the name of the broadcast, artist, or album to the receiver, the user currently has no easy way to download or purchase the broadcast. Instead, the user must typically write down or remember the identifying information and then go to a store or online retailer to purchase the broadcast, such as a song, album, audio book, news cast, pod-cast, video, movie, or any other desired broadcast. Not only is this inconvenient, but the user may forget the name of the broadcast or not be able to find a store that sells the content that was broadcasted. Additionally, the information provided by the broadcaster may not be enough to sufficiently identify the broadcast. For example, the user may have the title, but not the artist name, or other necessary identifying information and too many search results may appear for the user to efficiently find the desired broadcast. Some material, such as editorial news broadcasts or live events, may not be available for purchase or may be difficult to find.
Broadcasters also have problems providing promotional content to users, such as part of fund raisers, promotions, advertisements, or other marketing endeavors. Currently, broadcasters must direct users to a website, which requires special updating and may be difficult for a user to remember the domain name or find the content on the website. In addition, if a customer of a broadcaster wants the broadcaster to describe free content as part of a marketing campaign, the broadcaster is limited to providing the content over the web and therefore, limited in the amount of revenue received from the marketing campaign.
Some methods do currently exist wherein a user may select or tag a broadcast for purchase but generally they are complex and difficult to use. One such method uses a portable music device that is capable of capturing songs tags or program data while monitoring an AM/FM broadcast on the receiver for later downloading of the broadcast. In this method, the user selects their favorite songs as they are being played on the radio station and then must download the exact song from an Internet connected PC linking to the radio station server.
Another such method requiring an internet connected PC allows a user to interact with a data packet or broadcast data associated with a broadcast to allow the user to purchase the associated broadcast or make a pledge to a fund raiser. The broadcast once identified and paid for is downloaded to the receiver via an internet connection.
Additionally, users such as listeners or viewers of broadcast sometimes want to be able to record (“rip”) broadcast from the broadcast signals for later playback. Various solutions allow viewers and listeners to do this, but this requires manual editing and title marking to make the recorded broadcast desirable. Fade-ins, fade-outs and voice-overs in the broadcast signal prevent the recorded broadcast from matching the broadcast as produced. Fade-ins, fade-outs and voice-overs are part of the overall presentation of the broadcast and broadcasters have no incentive to provide clean broadcast for the users, Additionally, users do not know what broadcast is coming up next, so they do not know whether to be ready to rip the next broadcast, nor when to start or stop to record a broadcast that is free of background, such as fade-ins, fade-outs and voice-overs.
As such, it is desirable to have an improved method for recording a clean broadcast on a receiver that does not require manual input for starting and stopping the recording of the broadcast, is capable of complying with copyright restrictions, is able to be part of a promotion or campaign by the broadcaster or a client of the broadcaster, and further does not require a fee or subscription to later purchase the broadcast for playback on other devices.